Week 7: DATA TRANSLATION CHALLENGE

Name: Divya Ramesh

AMAZON 2019 ANNUAL SALES REPORT

Introduction

Audience: Managers in Amazon’s tech products division - presenting ideas to increase revenues.

Graph1: The graph below shows the total technology products sales generated in the Urban Areas of the US over the past 12 months in the Year 2019. There is an overall increase in the sales and the sales peak towards end of the year, in Q4 - the holiday season.

Note:Hover over each point on the graph to read the sales figure for each month.

Graph 2: Doing a further analysis of the total number of products purchased in each month, also shows that, December month is when customers have done a huge amount of shopping on the website,i.e., 28,114 products purchased in December. This is more than double of what has been purchased in January, and 42% more that of November, despite the fact that there is black Friday and cyber Monday sales in November. We can see that in December since maximum number of products have been purchased,that explains the casue of maximum revenue generated. Let us find out the products customers are interested to shop in December.

Peak of Holiday Season

Graph 3: We can see that the sales of AAA Batteries and AA Batteries top the list in December, but do they contribute or explain the high sales volume in December as they are only priced at USD2.99 and USD3.84 each, compared to more expensive items that are also sold in more than hundreds or thousands.

Top 15 Tech Products

Graph 4: Though batteries are sold in high volumes (AAA Batteries = 31012 nos. and AA Batteries = 27635 nos.), followed by USB-C Charging Cable, Lightning Charging Cable and Wired Headphones all sold more than 20,000 in quantity, these items do not account for the high sales generated by Amazon. The sales of these items sold more than 20,000 in volume contributes to less than approximately 3.5% of the total sales. On the contrary, the total sales of Macbook Pro Laptops alone accounts for approximately 25% of the total sales in the Year 2019. Hence let us further analyze the sales of high revenue generating products (>USD 4 million) across each month.

Conclusion

Graph 5: The graph shows the individual quantity of the top 3 products sold each month. These products, I would like to term as the ‘Prime Products’, as these are high revenue generating products as we have seen. If we focus our target in increasing the sales of these products it would yield higher revenue for Amazon. It can be seen that in holiday seasons there is a spike in the sales, however, this trend falls back in January. To avoid the January slump, I have a few proposals -

  • Leverage holiday activity : We need to take advantage of spike in customers during holiday season and deploy re-targeting tactics such as personalised emails/ads. Also position the products in a way that will make them use their gift cards with added discounts if spent on these products.

  • Move older inventory : Any excess stock of these prime items from last year could be used to cater to the price sensitive shopper and get the inventory moving with a January (post-holiday) clearance sale.

  • Increase customer traffic : Since customers are obsessed with batteries, these batteries can be offered as a token of gift if they purchase other prime products in January.